Badge earners should own their badges. Earners should be able to retrieve and save their badges, including all evidence and criteria. Earners should also be able to share their badges with the Mozilla Open Backpack.

Before I dig into our technical experiences, I’d like to explain why baked badges and evidence is so important to us. We work mostly with school age learners. They are getting plenty of skill assessment and certification via all the standardized testing that goes on nowadays in schools. Through badging, we have the opportunity to capture learning as it happens. We can support learners (1) reflecting on their learning experiences, (2) planning for future learning activities and (3) take ownership of their overall learning.

These badges that capture authentic learning experiences are especially important because they increase value overtime. Let’s say that a learner who attended maker party took part in the activity offered by Level Up and built a mechanical hand with straws and string. Later when they are in high school, they apply for an internship at the Adler Planetarium. In their essay for the application, they include a description of how their interest in science, space and robotics has developed over time. They include links to badges of some of the key activities that influenced them, including the badge with a picture of them as an 8 year old smiling and holding the robotic arm they made. This same badge has even more meaning as part of a timeline when they apply to M.I.T. or perhaps even for a faculty position at university.

In order for that badge to be available 10, 20 or 30 years from now, we need to create the technology now to support badges that last for long term. Any badge that relies on a url or a website, will not be available for the long term. Baked badges with evidence are an import component for supporting lifelong learning.

Our Approach

We created one C-STEMBE Maker Party badge that everyone who registered their account would receive. At at the C-STEMBE stations, the learner could also receive a badge for completing that activity. Each of those activity badges could have one or more evidence photos attached. Below is a diagram with the Maker Party badge that has two evidence badges, two activity badges, one with two photos as evidence and one with one photo as evidence.

This blog post will walk through how the Chicago Architecture Foundation can now issue badges from ForAllRubrics to the Chicago City of Learning.

Now that the Chicago Architecture Foundation (CAF) has given permission on the Chicago City of Learning for ForAllRubrics to access their account, CAF users can access their Chicago City of Learning Badges on ForAllRubrics.

CAF users can issue badges on ForAllRubrics to learners participating in their programs.

Learners can connect their ForAllRubrics account to their Chicago City of Learning account.

And the badges issued via ForAllRubrics are available on the Chicago City of Learning!

Good news! Students can now access ForAllRubrics from within Edmodo. They will be able to access published rubric results, view earned badges, self & peer assess classmates, pledge for badges, write to their ePortfolio and so much more! See our previous post for more info on Teacher access to ForAllRubrics via Edmodo.

Teachers Can Export Their Edmodo Rosters into ForAllRubrics:

In the ForAllRubrics App, Teachers Can Score their Students’ Work:

Students Can Access Their ForAllRubrics ePortfolio directly from Edmodo:

1. As an organization, it is hard to publicize learning opportunities.

2. As a learner, it is difficult to find relevant learning opportunities.

Our Solution

We are creating a pilot implementation that leverages RSS and open source software to experiment with a model implementation for Open Sharing of Learning Opportunities. For this pilot, we are collaborating with the Community STEM Badge Ecosystem and the Ultimate Hub Moonshot.

ForAllRubrics is going to host WordPress sites for organizations that want to publish information about learning opportunities. The learning opportunities will be shared as blog posts with event metadata to support discovery and recommendation.

Recommendation and publication of learning opportunities will be done on various platforms including WordPress and Tiki-Toki. The recommendations will be filtered and presented as appropriate for the target learners. The HIPC, C-STEMBE and Ultimate Hub teams will be working together to create effective pilot examples. These examples will help identify what is working and what steps we should take next.